"The Day They Met Again": A Review
Genre: Documentary prose · Reconstruction of a real case · A story about memory that outlasts a lifetime
Tagline: "A love story across time and space"
"The Day They Met Again" is a rare case within Real Stories where the author’s reconstruction rests not on personal experience or anecdote, but on a documented scientific investigation: the novella is based on a case studied by psychiatrist Ian Stevenson and his Turkish colleague Reşat Bayer in the 1960s and ’70s, published in the book Cases of the Reincarnation Type. Kadyrov adds no fiction to the case in the usual sense — he reconstructs the timeline and gives voice to people whose words and testimony are recorded in the files of a real investigation.
The story, for readers new to it: in Adana, Turkey, a man named Abit Süzülmüş kept two households — one with the childless Hatice, and one with Şehide, mother of five and expecting a sixth. An ordinary evening ends in murder: Abit and Şehide are found dead along with two of the younger children; two others survive by chance. One piece of jewelry is taken from Şehide’s body — nothing else, which immediately makes robbery a doubtful motive. Among those arrested is a worker of Abit’s named Ramazan, who is hanged by court order. A few months later, in two different families nearby, a boy named İsmail is born, followed a little over a year later by a girl named Cevriye. Almost as soon as he can talk, İsmail insists his name is Abit, names both of the dead man’s wives and his surviving children, asks why the house he was born into is so poor, and, with an accuracy neither his father nor the neighbors could explain, names his own killer — even though the official verdict had long since been handed down by then. Cevriye, independently, suddenly cries out in the dark, in terror, "Ramazan will kill me!" — a name no one had ever taught her — and recognizes, unprompted, on the street, the friends, the seamstress, and the sister of the dead Şehide. Over the following years, investigators interview dozens of witnesses and log forty-nine recognitions and statements tied to Abit’s life; nearly all of them check out, save for one detail — the murder weapon, which İsmail couldn’t have seen, since the blow landed from behind. The novella’s climax is the children’s meeting: five-year-old İsmail and four-year-old Cevriye, brought together by adults for the first time, embrace like old acquaintances, argue over how much livestock Abit supposedly owned, and ask each other, with no prompting, the exact same question — why the other didn’t come to help on the night of the murder. The novella’s postscript follows their later lives: İsmail visits Şehide’s children for years and, at sixteen, says he wants to marry Cevriye; Cevriye herself grows increasingly embarrassed by the story of her past life as she gets older and gradually pulls away — "one of them went on remembering. The other slowly learned to live as if she didn’t."
The device the whole novella turns on is an extreme documentary dryness exactly where the material could easily slide into sentimentality or mysticism: names, dates, case numbers, the figure "forty-nine recognitions" — instead of any authorial assurance that it’s all true. Kadyrov deliberately declines to interpret what happened or insist on reincarnation as an explanation — the text ends on a direct documentary caveat that the reality of the facts and the authenticity of the testimony aren’t proof of the phenomenon itself.
It’s exactly this combination — material that’s almost emotionally unbearable (a murdered pregnant woman, dead children, widows left with no explanation at all) paired with a narrator’s pointedly procedural tone, inventing nothing — that makes the novella what it is: not a story about a miracle, but a story about how far human memory can go, given enough witnesses and enough time.
Quote from the novella: "It was the day they met again."
#IskandarKadyrov #RealStories #TheDayTheyMetAgain #Review #DocumentaryProse #TrueStory #LiteraryNavigator #18plus
Tagline: "A love story across time and space"
"The Day They Met Again" is a rare case within Real Stories where the author’s reconstruction rests not on personal experience or anecdote, but on a documented scientific investigation: the novella is based on a case studied by psychiatrist Ian Stevenson and his Turkish colleague Reşat Bayer in the 1960s and ’70s, published in the book Cases of the Reincarnation Type. Kadyrov adds no fiction to the case in the usual sense — he reconstructs the timeline and gives voice to people whose words and testimony are recorded in the files of a real investigation.
The story, for readers new to it: in Adana, Turkey, a man named Abit Süzülmüş kept two households — one with the childless Hatice, and one with Şehide, mother of five and expecting a sixth. An ordinary evening ends in murder: Abit and Şehide are found dead along with two of the younger children; two others survive by chance. One piece of jewelry is taken from Şehide’s body — nothing else, which immediately makes robbery a doubtful motive. Among those arrested is a worker of Abit’s named Ramazan, who is hanged by court order. A few months later, in two different families nearby, a boy named İsmail is born, followed a little over a year later by a girl named Cevriye. Almost as soon as he can talk, İsmail insists his name is Abit, names both of the dead man’s wives and his surviving children, asks why the house he was born into is so poor, and, with an accuracy neither his father nor the neighbors could explain, names his own killer — even though the official verdict had long since been handed down by then. Cevriye, independently, suddenly cries out in the dark, in terror, "Ramazan will kill me!" — a name no one had ever taught her — and recognizes, unprompted, on the street, the friends, the seamstress, and the sister of the dead Şehide. Over the following years, investigators interview dozens of witnesses and log forty-nine recognitions and statements tied to Abit’s life; nearly all of them check out, save for one detail — the murder weapon, which İsmail couldn’t have seen, since the blow landed from behind. The novella’s climax is the children’s meeting: five-year-old İsmail and four-year-old Cevriye, brought together by adults for the first time, embrace like old acquaintances, argue over how much livestock Abit supposedly owned, and ask each other, with no prompting, the exact same question — why the other didn’t come to help on the night of the murder. The novella’s postscript follows their later lives: İsmail visits Şehide’s children for years and, at sixteen, says he wants to marry Cevriye; Cevriye herself grows increasingly embarrassed by the story of her past life as she gets older and gradually pulls away — "one of them went on remembering. The other slowly learned to live as if she didn’t."
The device the whole novella turns on is an extreme documentary dryness exactly where the material could easily slide into sentimentality or mysticism: names, dates, case numbers, the figure "forty-nine recognitions" — instead of any authorial assurance that it’s all true. Kadyrov deliberately declines to interpret what happened or insist on reincarnation as an explanation — the text ends on a direct documentary caveat that the reality of the facts and the authenticity of the testimony aren’t proof of the phenomenon itself.
It’s exactly this combination — material that’s almost emotionally unbearable (a murdered pregnant woman, dead children, widows left with no explanation at all) paired with a narrator’s pointedly procedural tone, inventing nothing — that makes the novella what it is: not a story about a miracle, but a story about how far human memory can go, given enough witnesses and enough time.
Quote from the novella: "It was the day they met again."
#IskandarKadyrov #RealStories #TheDayTheyMetAgain #Review #DocumentaryProse #TrueStory #LiteraryNavigator #18plus
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